What Muslims and Christians can learn from ‘The Saint and the Sultan’

It is within this context that I sat down with Paul Moses, professor of journalism at Brooklyn College, to discuss his new book, “The Saint and the Sultan,” a book written in part as a reflection on the tensions between Muslims and Christians after the events of Sept. 11.

Moses is a former senior religion writer, City Hall bureau chief and city editor at Newsday, where he was the lead writer in news coverage that won a Pulitzer Prize.

I think his book “The Saint and the Sultan” is a very important and timely book. The book reminds us that the true believers of dialogue and constructive encounters must be courageous enough to talk as well as to listen, even opposing their own people, in the name of justice, dignity and love.

 Mr. Moses, can you please tell us how you happened to write this specific story? How did it come about?

I just came upon it in my reading. There was this little book about St. Francis that goes back to the 1300s called “The Little Flowers of St. Francis,” a collection of stories about St. Francis, some of them true, some of them legendary. I saw this, and it was in this period some time after Sept. 11. There was so much tension between Christians and Muslims here in New York and elsewhere, and here I was reading this story about St. Francis meeting the sultan during the middle of the Fifth Crusade. They are getting along, and I thought, “Wow this is great; could this possibly be true?” I began to research, and it was well documented from sources in the 13th century. It just intrigued me and seemed like it would be worth telling in more depth.

Can you please give us more details about this saint. Why do you think he was different from the other saints? And why do you think that he was so famous?

Yeah, he really stands out for Christians amongst all the saints, and I call him the most beloved saint since the time of the apostles. There is just something about him that even in his lifetime towards the end of his life people already knew he was holy and was to be named a saint through the process that the Church had. He just gave so totally of himself to other people. He was so gentle, and so it is hard to explain why him. There are many other great saints, of course, but just for some reason from early on, he had a special place in the hearts of Christians. It’s hard to answer, really, but I guess because of his great goodness, holiness and generosity of spirit not only to people, but to animals and nature. There is something about him that even today, people really like him. Even people who are not really religious themselves…

Well actually, what I knew about him was that he liked animals, but in your book he looks a little bit like a controversial figure. Do you agree with that?

Yes, I think that is true. Yes, we have this image of St. Francis today as this patron saint of animals. When we see a statue of him, it’s usually with a bird on his shoulder or in his hands, and I think that’s true. He did have a special affection for animals, but I also see him in a much different way. If you really look closely at his story, first of all what he did in his own time was shocking to people. He refused to have any possessions, and he dressed in a way that was shocking to people that made a statement to other people that he was living a simple, pure life, that the other people were too attached to their material things. So right away it’s hard for us to imagine such a thing because we have such a sense of St. Francis as very peaceful and peace-loving figure, which he was, but just by what he did, the example he set, to the people around, he was controversial. He was actually subject to a lot of abuse when he changed his life to live in a simple way. People would throw things at him, and people would beat him up. His friars, as he began to send them out through Europe, were attacked frequently. They were at risk of being accused of heresy, and even worse things happening to them, and so, yeah, we don’t think of Francis as being a controversial figure. But he was.

In one of your interviews, you say that we have to look very closely at why he changed his life. Can you explain this?

Well, I portrayed his journey to the sultan during the crusade as a mission of peace, and I think to understand that we have to understand what made St. Francis change his life. When St. Francis grew up, he was the son of the richest merchant in his town of Assisi. There was constant violence in central Italy at that time; Assisi was going to war with its larger and more powerful neighbor, Perugia. So Francis was a soldier in that war as a knight. He was on horseback, and they went off into battle. The Assisians were massacred, and Francis saw that. … People he knew were all being hunted down like animals and killed. Francis survived because he was taken prisoner. Being the son of a very wealthy man, the Perugians knew they could get a good ransom for him, and so he was taken and thrown into a deep hole in the ground where he lived for a year. It was very damp and had very little light, and he was chained. That experience shattered him psychologically and to an extent physically also, so Francis, after he was finally released, was a hollow man. He begins to recover probably through prayer and contemplation, and that begins the process. If you know the story of Francis, you know the steps to it, but that begins the process, where he separates himself from the things of his time. He renounces his old identity, renounces all his belongings. He even has to separate himself from his family because his father was so angry at him and established this new identity as someone who was going to live a very simple life of penance. So when we look at Francis, when he goes on the Fifth Crusade, we know that we have to remember that he is somebody who knew about warfare. It really bothered him. What he sees going on in Egypt during the Crusade really bothered him. He wanted to find some other way. He was loyal to his faith, and he was loyal to the pope. But he didn’t like what was happening.

The main reason for Francis to go to the sultan and to talk to him was actually to convert the sultan, is that correct?

That’s right. Francis hoped to convert the sultan and thereby end the crusade.

Yes, but it didn’t work.

It didn’t work. The sultan was a good Muslim, and he believed in his faith. I think if we look at him, it shapes his actions, throughout the war and in his dealings with Francis. I guess that it is a controversial thing today that he was trying to convert him, but I talked to different Muslim scholars about that, and their feeling was that Francis was doing this differently from the way it was done in his time. First of all, he went to the sultan totally unarmed, and there was no hint of coercion on his part. He said to the sultan, “If you wish to speak to me, I will tell you so.” It was an offer the sultan could have refused. So I think that what was important about going to the sultan was the spirit of peace that he went with.

So can you please detail what exactly they talked about?

Yes, well the records aren’t clear enough to know for sure exactly what they spoke about. One difficult thing in writing the book was that in that period of history they weren’t writing letters much or things like that, so there is not that detail. But what we do know is that Francis would have greeted the sultan, and the sultan allowed him to speak and even to preach in his camp for like three days. We know that the sultan had his own religious experts there, and I would say Francis would have probably approached the sultan on some common ground because if he had said things that the sultan’s religious experts would have said to him that he couldn’t have this conversation, if Francis had, for example, criticized Mohammed, if he had criticized God in some way, I think the conversation would have ended. It wouldn’t have gone on for three days. So I think in Francis we get those insights into the conversation, but I couldn’t give you a dialogue without making it up.

Can you please tell us about Christians’ perceptions of Muslims and vice versa during that time? And how do you think that the Christians or Francis were changed after these meetings with the sultan?

I think in terms of perceptions, there are two levels here. One is that Christians and Muslims did business with each other, they traded. There were Christians that came from Venice and Genoa. They were in Egypt and doing business, quite a few, and the sultan encouraged that kind of trade. Then second there is what I guess is really wartime propaganda. So the Christians portrayed the Muslims, especially their leaders, in a kind of animal like/animalistic kind of imagery. So Francis would have not known much about Muslims when he was going there. Probably he thought what he was doing as extremely dangerous, which it was. It was wartime. He had crossed over into the enemy’s camp unarmed, and so it was dangerous.

The sultan is a little different because he had more experience in dealing with Christians than the Crusader army would have or Francis would have because Egypt has a Christian population. So the sultan had extensive dealings with the Coptic Christians in Egypt and was perhaps in all of Egypt’s history probably the closest to the Christians of Egypt. He was often called on to mediate their disputes. For example, there was a big dispute over who would be the Coptic patriarch of Egypt, and the sultan always did this with great sensitivity for the religious traditions of the Christians. He didn’t impose his own person there or anything like that. So there is a book called “The History of the Patriarchs of Egypt.” It’s a medieval account of the Egyptian church, and it creates a very favorable portrait of Sultan Melek-el-Kamel.

Were you inspired to write this book because of the horrible effects of Sept. 11? Can this be inferred?

That certainly had something to do with it. It made this story timely. I wrote about Sept. 11 when I worked for Newsday. At the time, I wrote the main story, and it was my job to take all these terrible things people saw and felt and combine them into one news story. I had been a religion reporter at Newsday, and so I was thinking a lot in terms of how could religion be the basis for this. What is “real” religion? What is authentic about religion? And when is it being used falsely. So I was thinking a lot about that, and I think that both Francis and the sultan give us the real authentic religion that they are from. So Francis really wanted to return Christians to their early traditions of the time of the apostles.

Francis reminds Christians that their religion is rooted in nonviolence, which by the time of the crusades had definitely been lost. And the sultan brings up an interesting Muslim tradition, too, which is respect for holy Christians, especially holy Christian monks. It’s a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of Islam; the Prophet Mohammed would have known Christian monks in the desert. There are a number of experts on Islam who pointed this out to me. One who stands out in my mind right now is Mahmoud Ayoub, who is now at Hartford Seminary. He was a professor at Temple University when I spoke to him; he felt that this is important for Muslims to focus on, this tradition in Islam. So I said Francis points Christians to their tradition; the love of enemies is a part of tradition often forgotten. So they both do that, I think. You know, it’s distressing to see religion used for evil, and so both of them point out us to what’s good in their traditions. That’s one of the things that appealed to me in the story.

You portrayed Islam and the sultan in a very positive way in your book. Were you criticized for that?

I have not been. I was afraid that I might be because, you know, sometimes I write online on blogs and so forth, and the blog world can be very crude. I was wondering. But that hasn’t happened, and I am glad. However, it was something that I was aware of as a possibility. In fact, the reviews that I am seeing have all commented on the portrait of the sultan in a positive way, but you know, I didn’t start out that way. As a journalist, my sense of someone who is in charge of the country, you know us journalists, we tend to be suspicious of people in authority, but it was only as I really researched more thoroughly, got to know the sultan as a man, I really saw him as a special person. He ruled Egypt for 40 years, 20 years as viceroy, and 20 years as sultan. And he did it really well, and as I said I think his religious views shaped him. He was also very practical. He knew that the best thing to do was to avoid war if you can, for practical reasons. It’s better to avoid war if you can, so his inclination was always to try to encourage trade with the enemy and encourage negotiation if there was war.

At the end of the Crusades, Christians had managed to get a ways into Egypt. They conquered Damietta, which is at the mouth of the Nile, and then they went further. They didn’t really know where they were going, and the sultan’s soldiers were able to raise the level of the Nile and trapped the Christian soldiers. So they could have killed every one of them, but that would have served no good purpose at the time, and it would have only incited further warfare. So the sultan shocked them by feeding the Christian army and providing them with safe passage out of Egypt, and at the end, they praised him. The leader of the expedition is this kind of person. He wrote to the sultan and said truly you are Kamel [perfect, right?], and so it ended on that note. So I think the sultan is an important historical figure, also. You know St. Francis is so famous, so I try to make the sultan an equal partner in the book.

Ok, so what do you think Muslims and Christians can learn from your book when we look at the issue in terms of the political tensions between Christians and Muslims?

Yes, in terms of religion, there are some good things going on right now. There is the Common Word initiative. I think things like that are a good start. I guess one thing is to not demonize others that you don’t know. I think that is another thing that I have learned from looking closely at Francis. All around him people demonized the enemy, and Francis never says (in all the writings) anything negative about all the Muslims. I’m sure in his mind they were missing out on salvation, but he never says anything negative. You never hear “infidel” or anything like that. I think that it is important for us on both sides: How we approach the other and yes, we don’t share the same beliefs, but we are people. And I think that is part of the example mentioned above.